This Is the Most American Sign in America

This sign (there's a larger photo after the jump) hangs in the window of a spy supply store on Biscayne Boulevard at NE 137th Street, right across from a Dairy Queen drive-thru lane, which somehow seems appropriate.

The only thing more 'Merican than paranoia and patriotism, after all, is a 1,000-calorie upside-down dairy confection bought and consumed in your car.

Still, every time we get a banana cream pie Blizzard, we see the sign and are nagged by worry: Do the owners of Spytrix know something we don't?

We finally just asked them. "We made the sign after 9/11, and we never threw it away," explains co-owner Josefina Capriles. Turns out gas masks and car flags were Spytrix's best-selling items in those days of apocalypse and Toby Keith.

So it's a relic, but not completely without purpose today. Spytrix still sells gas masks and car flags, baby -- and, of course, "nanny cameras." God bless this country.